A touchscreen for finger-based navigation - including multi-touch capabilites - is required.

The impact of the iPhone on Android in two documents. Google knew the iPhone would change the market, while Microsoft, Nokia, and BlackBerry did not. That's why Android is now the most popular smartphone platform, while the mentioned three are essentially irrelevant.

Wait, wait, wait, so now, if touch screens weren't readily available, where did Apple get them? If this whole thing was so obvious, why did no one but Apple take the lead, and then everyone followed suit doing what was so "obvious"?

"anyone with half a brain knew that capacitive plus multitouch was the way to move forward" but no one did, so your saying that anyone should be able to come along after the cost of implementation has spent, and not the ability to recoup, because hey, everyone deserves technology for free. Salaries, Sallie Mae student loans be damned, your years of reserach should be free to all users and multi-billion dollar corps alike.

If this whole thing was so obvious, why did no one but Apple take the lead, and then everyone followed suit doing what was so "obvious"?

Somebody is always the first to do something, but that doesn't mean that what they did was worthy of a patent. Do you think that the first person that realized that they could sell products online should have been granted a patent that would have prevented anyone else from selling products online for 20 years? Most sane people would say that the "invention" was obvious, even if no one had already done it before. The same thing applies here.

but no one did, so your saying that anyone should be able to come along after the cost of implementation has spent, and not the ability to recoup, because hey, everyone deserves technology for free. Salaries, Sallie Mae student loans be damned, your years of reserach should be free to all users and multi-billion dollar corps alike.

How much do you think it costs to develop pinch-zoom and bounce scrollback? Those are things I could have done by myself in college in less than a week each (bounce scrollback within a weekend). You are clearly not a software developer and you're giving Apple way too much credit.

You are clearly not a software developer and you're giving Apple way too much credit.

You are clearly not an interaction designer.

Yeah, you can "hack out" something in a day or two. But so often, the devil is in the details.

Apple would have spent months fine-tuning interaction speeds, thresholds, algorithms for handling the multi-touch inputs. All of this stuff seems invisible once the product is launched to anyone who wasn't involved - "just works" is damn hard, and too often people that don't understand the work involved in perfecting these interfaces and their interactions massively underestimate just how difficult and time-consuming this part is.

Wait, wait, wait, so now, if touch screens weren't readily available, where did Apple get them? If this whole thing was so obvious, why did no one but Apple take the lead, and then everyone followed suit doing what was so "obvious"?

Prototypes are usually available for at least 10 years before they become a mainstream commercial product. The CD player was developed in 1969 but didn't become a mainstream consumer product for more than 15 years.

"anyone with half a brain knew that capacitive plus multitouch was the way to move forward" but no one did, so your saying that anyone should be able to come along after the cost of implementation has spent, and not the ability to recoup, because hey, everyone deserves technology for free. Salaries, Sallie Mae student loans be damned, your years of reserach should be free to all users and multi-billion dollar corps alike.

The world's universities release hundreds of billions of dollars worth of research every year for free.

Wait, wait, wait, so now, if touch screens weren't readily available, where did Apple get them? If this whole thing was so obvious, why did no one but Apple take the lead, and then everyone followed suit doing what was so "obvious"?

"anyone with half a brain knew that capacitive plus multitouch was the way to move forward" but no one did, so your saying that anyone should be able to come along after the cost of implementation has spent, and not the ability to recoup, because hey, everyone deserves technology for free. Salaries, Sallie Mae student loans be damned, your years of reserach should be free to all users and multi-billion dollar corps alike.

Ok, thanks.

Actually Apple was not first with the idea of a touch sceen phone. Even the icons of the Prada was quite similar to what appeared in iOS even though the Prada version was in stylish black & white.

The iPhone-like LG Prada was. presented to the public months before iPhone was released, and the trend at the time was to make phones with larger and larger screens. It is no surprise that Apple was first, due to their brand recognition they could charge a high price for their product so, they could use the latest and still rare and expensive technology in their product.

So I would say smartphones a la Android would have happend with or without Apple. It's not like Apple developed the large screens, thy were just one of the first to be able to utilize them in their products.

By the way, as far as I know Apple have never complained about LG copying iPhone, even though their phones look no less like iPhone copies than e.g. Samsung phones, I wonder why...